Please Send Me Your Cheapest Price

It’s the stupidest statement in all of domain negotiation emails. I can honestly say that I have an exact success rate of 0% when the first offer contains that statement. Does the person on the other end of that quote think that I’m all of a sudden going to drop my price because of this Jedi mind trick of a statement? If anything, I raise my price just to spite them. And that’s if I even reply to the email in the first place.

I’m used to it by now from the mass quote requests I get for the numeric domains. Foreign numeric offers are all pretty much the same. “I am interested in NNNN.com. Please send me your lowest price” It’s a numbers game (pun intended) and they are hoping that one out of a thousand will bite and the will get a great deal on a name. With only 10,000 possible domains, it’s pretty easy to email every owner and try and get a response. I don’t even respond any more because 99% of the time they are merely fishing and the other 1% will get back to me again if they are truly interested.

Stating your intentions in your emails is pointless and bad business. “I don’t want to pay a lot for that muffler” is a good advertising campaign but not a good negotiation technique. I realize nobody is going to start out, “send me whatever price you want because I REALLY want this domain” but coming across as cheap hinders more than it helps. A simple low bid and working it up will IMO result in a better price. A “more than I am willing to pay” at any point in the negotiation will let the seller know you are out unless the price comes down. Throwing out your cheapness up front only makes the seller think you aren’t a serious buyer.

7 comments

As Owners/Sellers, we shouldn’t have to name a price just because someone asked.

If you are an unmotivated seller, and a potential buyer contacted you first, let them name a price/offer first. I’ve received a couple emails recently where they contact me asking if my domain is for sale and how much. Recently I’ve replied, once with a price and once with a price range – never to here a reply. I think my replies will now be more like “for sale for the right price. what’s your offer?”.

@Steve: $400 sounds like a reasonable number to start a negotiation for your asking price. Why go up in price and piss him off? That makes no sense. If your bottom line was, say, $1000 then let him know and move on if he’s not interested.

If he started at $50 then the red flags should probably go up. Even at that low number, counter then politely close the negotiation if it becomes obvious that the buyer isn’t going to come close to your price.

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